Page 55 of Slack Tide Kill

Male

Late 50s

Local

Fascination with order/chaos

Career in blue lights or tied to Dungeness/Romney Marsh landscape

Experienced a trauma in the '70s

She stepped back. It was a lens, if cloudy. A filter of sorts. Alongside what Mercer had told them about alibis, it ruled out all their current suspects.

"I think the Rooks really are clear," she said.

"Fuck the Rooks," Liam spat.

Sally kept looking. She thought about the theories and the history DeVon Collier had shared. The words seemed to flow around her like a tide. Layers of the past washing in and out, each adding a new layer of shingle to the cuspate foreland, each eroding a portion away, washing into the marsh and washing out again.

Spreading. Tainting. Contaminating.

There was something there, maybe. Something she could almost feel, on the tip of her tongue. A connection, maybe, unseen as yet but lurking.

"What did you make of their theory on Heraclitus?"

"B107? Eyes and ears? It's conspiracy theory bullshit, linking nonsense to other nonsense!" He swiveled. "What murder opens a question? Where do they even get this stuff from? And I've been to the Camino de Santiago. I didn't walk it all, OK, but I saw it, and I did not see one damn cockle shell!"

Sally half-listened, letting her mind drift back over the day, searching for whatever it was that felt off. She pictured herself standing over the body, looking down at that perfectly smoothed hair, neck craned back, sightless eyes staring.

What had this young man witnessed? Had he understood it, at the end? Had he been wise, or a barbarian soul?

"And that crap about cops being in the profile? I knew she'd have it in for us. Head shrinkers like her always do. Just because we're on the thin blue bloody line, it doesn't mean we're all drowning in 'trauma', can't handle our shit, are just one step away from taking a long walk off a short pier with rocks in our pockets."

Sally followed herself back out along the vastness of Dungeness. Walking the strand line. Looking at the shells. Feeling the space, the immensity, the power. Love. Death. Chaos. Order.

Up to the Crab Shack, where its own blind, barbarian eye watched out over a beach that–

She twitched, then bolted to her feet. Liam halted another tirade mid-flow.

"What is it?"

"One second." Sally stalked to the whiteboard, mind accelerating as she made the leap. She drew a large circle around the Rook family, labelled it 'CCTV', then drew three lines pointing off to the side.

"The killer wanted to come in unseen," she said rapidly, turning back to Liam. "They wanted to be invisible. Do we agree on that?"

"I suppose it's likely, sure. No one wants their killing witnessed. What's that got to do with–"

"Let's say it's true." She wrote 'Reactor CCTV' next to the first of the three lines, then drew a cross next to it. "That means they blinded the reactor camera. They knew which one. They knew how to do it, how long to do it for, and how to get away with it."

"OK." Liam's eyes narrowed. "So, we're trying to build a suspect list from that? People who were in the reactor that night?"

"It's a starting point, sure, but there's more than one way to blind a camera. The killer could have paid someone to do it. They could have set it up to go dark in advance, or triggered an analog intercept. I think we can do better."

She wrote 'Lamppost CCTV' on the second line, then added another cross. "This one was cut, and recently. The killer climbed up to ensure there'd be no oversight."

Liam watched her work. "No surprises there. But there's nothing to narrow it down. It could be anyone."

"Someone who can climb," Sally corrected, "mid-50s, I guess that's plausible, but with a ladder, whatever, yes, it could be anyone. But all this is just preamble."